One Year Away

Joseph

After staying in Koh Phangan island for
almost a week we got a ferry/bus combo ticket to take us to Phuket
(pronounced poo-ket) on the west coast.  Phuket is a major tourist
destination in south Thailand on the Andaman coast.  It attracts mainly an older crowd on
package holidays. 

It being the busy holiday season we did
something we almost never do; try to make room reservations.  From
the bus we called all the budget hotels and guesthouses listed in our
guidebook. No luck, all were full.  The only place available was a
relatively expensive resort at the edge of town.  Resigned to another
budget busting day in Thailand we checked ourselves in at around 6
PM.

From there we walked to the center of
town where all the ‘soi’s‘ (lane or small street) near the
beach are packed with bars and restaurants catering to tourists. The
first two major bar streets have go go bars where up to a dozen women
are dancing on the specially designed bars at any one time.  There
was even one entire street of bars featuring extremely convincing
“ladyboys”. All the streets were crowded with tourists, many of
the men had their Thai “girlfriend” clinging to their arm.

We had an overpriced meal and started
to make plans to leave first thing the next morning.  The great thing about traveling like we do is that if we don’t like a place we can leave immediately.  And we did.

Koh Phi Phi Don is about 2 hours and a
world away from Phuket.  The ferry dropped us off at the
long
pier
and we trudged through the small town of Noi San with our heavy
packs.  The main strip of the town has loads of guesthouses one after
another.  Unfortunately they all seemed to have small handwritten
signs, “Full”.  Finally, the last place on the strip, Garden
House, had one room left and we jumped on it.   Behind us came a
steady stream of backpackers all looking for accommodations eying us
jealously as we took the keys. 

During peak periods finding a room on
the island can be tough, partly because many of the beachside
bungalows on the island were destroyed during the tsunami of two
years ago.  The island is now rebuilding and new places are going up.
In a blow to future budget backpackers most of the accommodations
that are being put up are more upscale pricier places.

The first thing I noticed about Koh Phi
Phi was the sound, or rather lack of it.  There are no cars on the
island, and the only motorcycle we saw had a huge sidecar and
appeared to be the local garbage truck.  The place is definitely a
tourist town but somehow has managed to maintain a quaint laid back
feeling.

There are 18 scuba diving shops of the
small island.  They are on every street and seem to outnumber the
restaurants.  Figuring that this was a good sign about the quality of
the diving nearby I signed up for a couple of local dives and Penny
signed on for snorkeling (she’s resisted all my attempts to convince
her to get scuba certified).  The next day we boarded the scuba boat
and headed to Koh Phi Phi Leh, which is the sister island to Koh Phi
Phi Don.  This island is part of a national park and has been spared
any sort of development.  It is famous for its scuba diving and as
being the location where they filmed the movie, The Beach.  Maya Bay,
is the exact location where the filming took place and we saw it from
the scuba boat as we approached our dive spot.  Or rather we saw 30
or more boats anchored in the water almost obscuring the crowded
beach.  It’s not the remote island paradise where the movie was set,
at least not anymore.  Since there are no accommodations on Phi Phi
Leh people make day trips out to visit the famous beach.

The scuba diving excellent.  We had
good visibility and saw beautiful corals, an enormous variety of
colourful tropical fish, sting rays and even a leopard shark.  Penny
saw most of the same things just by snorkeling near the shore
(although she carefully avoided the area where the sharks were). 

Other than scuba diving we spent some
time on Long Beach, a beautiful if crowded stretch of sand close to
the main town.  We also rented a sea kayak and made our way out to
Monkey Beach to feed the wild monkeys that come out of the jungle to
eat fruit offered by locals and tourists. 

Our time in Koh Phi Phi was up and we
caught a ferry to the mainland.  From there we traveled to the south of Thailand to visit a remote Marine National Park,
Mu Ko Tarutao.  We’ll write about this incredible park in our next post.